Topographies of Memory and Amnesia in Poland and Spain
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“WHERE FOOT KNOCKS AGAINST/THE UNBURIED BONES OF KIN”: TOPOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY AND AMNESIA IN POLAND AND SPAIN BY ALEXANDRA BROOKE VAN DOREN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2019 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Brett Kaplan, Chair Associate Professor Eric Calderwood Professor Elena Delgado Associate Professor George Gasyna ABSTRACT This dissertation identifies and refashions a critical point of convergence between Poland and Spain’s national histories under the umbrella of Holocaust and Memory Studies in its examination of selections from each country’s respective canon of film and literature pertaining to the Holocaust and Spanish Civil War. The resistance to literary and visual depictions of wartime memory in Poland and Spain poses a multitude of imperative questions that revolve around the denial of national guilt and the resulting government-sanctioned cultural amnesia. Two such illustrations of institutionalized practices of forgetting are Spain’s pacto de silencio (pact of silence), imposed after the death of Franco, and Poland’s recent law making it a criminal offense to discuss or imply Polish guilt in crimes of the Holocaust, which emerged as a product of a longstanding history of resisting any admission of collaboration or complicity. I will focus primarily on the intersections between the survivor testimony and stories of witness that began to surface both during and in the immediate wake of World War II in Poland and the Spanish Civil War in Spain and more recent depictions of the “black-listed” memory of the Holocaust and crimes of fascist dictatorships in twentieth and twenty first-century literature and film in both countries. It is imperative to identify the traumatic site with which current political bodies will not contend before parsing out issues of exile, transitions into democracy, and intergenerational legacies of shame that lead us back to the present moment at the culmination of the dissertation. The conditions necessary to create political and cultural environments like those described in Poland and Spain are structural, and not unique to any one nation; the fact that these countries have not previously been examined in conjunction with one another lends itself as evidence to the assertion that the active suppression of memory in newly formed democracies is not dependent on national identities. While there are many conditions that pave the way for historical ii amnesia to manifest, some fall outside the scope of this project. Therefore, this dissertation addresses only the following conditions: the political fallout in the wake of World War II and the Spanish Civil War, the construction of collective memory spaces within the larger European memory project of the EU to which all member states must subscribe, the influence of the Catholic Church during the wars and over the shape of post-war memory, the role of graveyards as sites of reckoning with the past, and the issue of conflating competing traumatic memories in order to privilege one version of history over another. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without the financial support of the Comparative Literature Departmental Fellowship, University YMCA’s Fred S. Bailey Fellowship, two FLAS Fellowships awarded from the European Union Center for language development in Polish and Spanish as well as a position as a Doctoral Research Assistant for the last three years, and the Gendell Family and Shiner Family Fellowship from the Program in Jewish Culture and Society. I am indebted to the Comparative Literature Department Chair Professor Lilya Kaganovsky and to each of my committee members, Professors Brett Kaplan, George Gasyna, Eric Calderwood, and Elena Delgado, who have supported my career goals as both an academic and human rights attorney, and who worked actively to ensure that I had the opportunity to complete this degree program amidst difficult and complicated personal circumstances, offering professional and personal support on many occasions. I am grateful to Carla Santos, Kim Rice, and Sebnem Ozkan at the European Union Center for their generosity and gracious support of my research by providing funding and ample time to complete this dissertation without neglecting my duties as a parent. Throughout the writing process, I became not only a prospective Doctor of Philosophy, but also a founder of a non-profit organization, wife, and mother. Each of the members of my Dissertation Committee has provided me with extensive guidance and taught me a great deal about both research in the humanities and life in general in these various capacities. I would especially like to thank Professor Brett Kaplan, the chair of my committee. As my teacher and advisor, she has thoughtfully guided my research through sometimes painful and difficult topics, offering me opportunities to develop and sharpen my scholarship through various reading groups, conferences, programs, and events. iv Lastly, and most importantly, I want to acknowledge my family. My husband, Ivan, has been the pillar of strength and support in our home, celebrating my successes and raising me up in my failures. He has shared this academic journey with me gracefully and lovingly, reading, watching, and listening to countless hours of survivor testimonies and being a sounding board for all of the ideas that germinated in the process of writing this dissertation. My daughter, Kora, has been a beacon of love, happiness, and tenacity, reminding me of my capabilities and obligation to fulfill my potential in order to instill this in her as she grows. My stepson, Parker, has brought laughter and levity to our home, and has taught me to adapt and always press forward. Thank you for providing unending inspiration in a project where it might have been otherwise too easy to lose faith in humanity. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1: CRYPTO-MEMORY AND THE POLITICS OF AMNESIA ...................................................... 11 CHAPTER 2: HISTORY AT ODDS: CONTESTED MEMORY SPACES IN POKŁOSIE, POLAND, AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ............................................................................................................................. 39 CHAPTER 3: DIVERTING NATIONAL MEMORY IN SPAIN: STATE-SANCTIONED VIOLENCE IN PA NEGRE AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ...................................................................................................... 76 CHAPTER 4: ELEGIES FROM THE GRAVEYARD: RESISTING BURIALS OF MEMORY IN THE POETRY OF CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ AND TADEUSZ RÓZEWICZ .............................................................. 113 CHAPTER 5: EXHUMATIONS, CONFRONTATIONS, AND SPANISH POETS OF THE GRAVE ......... 143 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................................ 173 APPENDIX FOR MEMORIAL IMAGES ...................................................................................................... 181 vi INTRODUCTION The shape of this dissertation has evolved significantly since its conception in December of 2016, in part because a successful dissertation should retain an amorphous quality so that it can adapt to the constant acquisition of new knowledge in the research stage, but also because legislation passed in Poland and Spain within the last two years has drastically altered the foundation of historical memory in each country for better or worse. The stakes of this project are predicated on its relevance. The significance of its contribution to the field of Holocaust and Memory Studies can be measured by 1) its development of a language of connectivity through which it narrates the wartime experiences of Poland and Spain and the cultural, social, and political shockwaves that can be felt at present and 2) its ability to examine, engage with, and possibly predict movements towards historical amnesia in countries reeling from legacies of totalitarianism and/or dictatorships under the auspices of democracy. The remainder of this introductory chapter will encapsulate the central claims of each chapter as well as provide an overview of supporting evidence presented in this dissertation. Additionally, this introduction will look as objectively as possible at the aims and objectives of the project as a whole, recommendations for future research, acknowledgements of the limitations of this project, and a summary of this project’s contribution to the fields of Comparative Literature and Holocaust and Memory Studies. The structure of this dissertation as a project unfolding in reverse chronological order is intentional. The ultimate objective of this project is to investigate the conditions that nourish the breeding grounds for historical amnesia in countries coming out from under the bootheels of fascist dictatorships. Our point of departure in the first two chapters is the exploration of contemporary film in Poland and Spain, which contextualizes the precarious political 1 circumstances that have taken root in the countries’ respective governments in relation to wartime memory. We then move “backwards” to meet the very site of trauma itself: the brutalized body of the victim of the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War in poetry